New Blood

And as promised, I will now post some pictures of my more recent masks. These range from around 7 years old, to a few weeks. Most of my work lately has been in clay, but I am contemplating some more mixed-media creations, especially a new shell-mask a friend has commissioned me to make for her house.

I wanted something with horns. The picture is a little tilted. I may try to correct that when I have time.

My newest shell mask. The starfish is a metal broach.

One of my favorite of my newest masks. I may have to keep her. Clay, glass and copper leaf.

I had square glass beads.

The second shell mask I ever made, intended to be more masculine than the first one.

this one is wearable, and I once scared some trick-or-treaters with it. The one who didn’t run got the most candy.

Papier mâché, grass, persimmon caps, moss and glass.

One of my mother’s favorites, though I have never quite been satisfied with it.

This one is a memorial to a tree of mine that had to be cut down.

An early mask, though obviously not one of the original set.

My parents brought me home a horseshoe crab shell. It makes a fragile but impressive mask.

Lattice clay work, nail-polish and Siberian Iris leaves.

This present for a friend was a long time in coming. Sometimes it takes me a while to find a mask that I think will really please someone.

Ah, blue oni. I made this one out of clay, all for the fangs.

One of my more creepy creations, made from papier mâché, lily leaves, gold paper and a lion pendant.

10 responses to “New Blood”

Thank you! That is one of my favorites, too. I do most of these on impulse, little or no planning, and so when they turn out well I am pleasantly surprised. The creation of masks is a meditative process to me, and a way for me to celebrate both the beauty of creation, and the shard of creative drive God placed in me.

Thank you!
I can’t say that any are specifically Middle-Earth inspired, but in a way, they all are. Everything that inspires me, resonates in me, and fills me with the desire to create comes out in my masks. The tree-masks definitely have some Ent in them, and if I think about it, other elements of Tolkien will surface from the others.

As a child, masks scared me because they were just another way of hiding a person. At the same time, as pretty much everyone does, I saw faces in everything, from cars, to wood-grain, to clouds. When I was in college I realized that I could use masks to give faces to objects and thoughts and feelings. For that reason, I don’t really make masks to wear (though some of mine can be worn) but rather to hang on the wall and be themselves. My first masks were clay, and were obviously not intended to be worn (they have no eye-holes) and I enjoyed making them so much that I just couldn’t stop. That’s nearly ten years ago, now, and I still delight in finding ways to make faces out of various objects, as well as clay.

Every time I see your masks, I want to write a book about some culture that wears them (daily or for ceremonial stuff) so it can be made into a movie and I can get you to do the costumes.These are too cool to not be in a story. Do masks ever come into your writing?

Well, I wrote a mock-archeological exhibition for the original set about a plant-worshiping culture that only ate meat (since plants figured so prominently in a lot of the masks). I created five “periods” for the culture, tracing them through early development, up into a golden era and into a decadent decline. :)
Other than that, I have not featured them in stories yet.